Guilty: Indian Man and Accomplice Convicted in Deadly U.S.-Canada Border Smuggling of Indian Family
- The federal trial saw testimony from an alleged participant in the smuggling ring, a survivor, border patrol agents and forensic experts.
A jury in Minnesota today found Harshkumar Patel, an Indian citizen based in the U.S., and his American accomplice Steve Shand, guilty of all charges related to a human smuggling case involving an Indian family that froze to death at the U.S.-Canada border. Patel, 29, and Shand, 50, were part of a sophisticated illegal operation that has brought increasing numbers of Indians into the U.S., the jury concluded. The duo was convicted on four counts related to human smuggling, including conspiracy to bring migrants into the country illegally.
Speaking after today’s verdict at the federal courthouse in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, Andrew Luger, the U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, said the trial “exposed the unthinkable cruelty of human smuggling and of those criminal organizations that value profit and greed over humanity.”
Patel and Shand carried out smuggling trips between Manitoba and Minnesota on several occasions between December 2021 and January 2022. They also conducted a similar trip on Jan. 19, 2022, when Jagdish Patel, 39, his wife, Vaishali, 37, their 11-year-old daughter, Vihangi, and their three-year-old son, Dharmik, were found in a snow-drifted field just 12 meters from the U.S. border. The couple were schoolteachers, the Associated Press said citing local news reports. “The family was fairly well off by local standards, living in a well-kept, two-story house with a front patio and a wide veranda,” the AP report said.
Harshkumar Patel, who is not related to Jagdish Patel and his family, was arrested this February in Chicago and was charged in U.S. federal court in the District of Minnesota for transportation of an illegal alien and conspiracy. Shand was arrested on the morning of Jan. 19, 2022, by U.S. border patrol agents as he was in a rented 15-seater passenger van in Minnesota, just south of the Canadian border near Emerson.
The most serious counts carry maximum sentences of up to 20 years in prison, the U.S. Attorney’s Office told the AP before the trial. However federal sentencing guidelines rely on complicated formulas. Luger said “Various factors will be considered in determining what sentences prosecutors will recommend,” the AP report added.
The federal trial saw testimony from an alleged participant in the smuggling ring, a survivor of the treacherous journey across the northern border, border patrol agents, and forensic experts, the AP reported. Shand’s team argued that he was unwittingly roped into the scheme by Patel, the AP said. But the Canadian Press reported that Patel’s lawyers maintained that their client had been misidentified. They said “Dirty Harry,” the alleged nickname for Patel found in Shand’s phone, is a different person. Bank records and witness testimony from those who encountered Shand near the border didn’t tie him to the crime, they added, according to the AP.